Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

“Joan?”

Who calls out to her in such a room? But there is no room. It is Leone, and the ground under her feet, and the smell of their rifles and of bodies recently made dead. She snaps to.

“Same firepower. From the past. Yes.”

Joan watches Leone run her hand along the length of a single PG-29 rocket. Her eyes linger on the small bone at Leone’s wrist.

Ironic. A replica of the very munitions she herself used in Orléans. Years ago. A nine-day battle at the height of her command. Those old dead wars leaving artifacts everywhere.

So the CIEL bastards are using old Earth firepower. She turns the tubular metal object over in her hands. She holds the blue black metal cylinder upright. She smells it. Dirt and death and alloy. She strokes the length of it, its shaft a tandem warhead and rocket booster. She fingers the folding stabilizer fins at its tail, spits on its metal side.

Fuckers.

The only place someone needs weapons of war is down here. Not up there. Did that mean there were large numbers of humans left? How many? Where? Or just random individuals? Untethered civilian armies? Random feral children?

Wind skates the valley. In the distance, foothills climb up toward a low mountain range. A rain forest once rimmed the rocky face of these mountains; she can’t remember its name.

Joan gazes once more at the dead men, then pockets the recorder and earbuds and looks up again at the night. There’s probably a Skyline near. Wherever there is a munitions station, a Skyline isn’t far away. The dark and thickened sky may obscure it from view, but she knows what is up there: invisible technological tethers dangling down to Earth like umbilical cords. The planet’s population of Earth’s elite above, now living an ascended existence away from a dying environment.

Joan walks over to a field table under the camouflage canopy and rummages around. The table is littered with topographical maps, rendered in plastic. She spreads her palm on one flat of the table and leans over it. “What’s this?”

Leone comes close beside her and shines infrared light from the barrel of her rifle onto the map. “Looks like… what the fuck are those weird markings?” Leone laughs under her breath. “They look like fucking lightning bolts. Were these idiots just sitting here doodling?”

Nothing but night answers.

Joan looks out into the dark desert in front of them, then over to the foothills and mountains. The topography no longer means anything. There are deserts and mountains and water. Sometimes. Maps are useless. Life is underground.

How many salvage missions had they traveled together around the world, abandoned tanks and military vehicles they’d located and hidden like vertebrae on a spine? Collecting food and ammunitions and supplies for survival—at first with the assumption that they’d have to stockpile large quantities for their comrades, survivors, former rebels and civilians, maybe even enemies. But through all their travels and elaborate missions a bald truth emerged: the people they found came to them, now and then, in the form of a single feral child, or as enemy combatants stationed sparsely along their path, guarding resource arsenals headed Skyward.

Where had all the people gone? they had wondered. Was it possible that entire armies, populations, had truly been atomized by geocatastrophic waves? Or had they gone forever subterranean, like Joan and Leone?

When the fuel began to deteriorate and run out, it became absurd to try to replenish it. It became absurd to maintain the old travel routes.

Finally it became absurd even to believe these rumors of roving bands of survivors. It was as if humans had devolved, like the earth’s erosion, crumbling and sliding and disappearing back into soil and rock and dry riverbed. Or maybe back to their breathable blue past… into ocean and salt and molecules.

Joan shakes her head and focuses on the map in her hands.

Find and obliterate the Skyline.

Confiscate munitions.

Blow what’s left.

Get out.

Joan looks up. If supplies are coming and going down this Skyline, it is imperative to destroy it. If anything else—an attack—comes down, we are nowhere near prepared.

Joan starts collecting what she can of the ammunition. Leone matches her every move. As they work, the child’s song weaves through her skull. Moon, are you nothing more than a ball?

Then a crack splits the air around them. Joan claps her hands over her ears and drops low to the ground, faster than an animal. Leone crouches under the table and puts her head between her knees. The sky lights up with red, green, and blue light. More magnificently than any aurora. The ground rumbles beneath them.

Leone immediately positions and fires into the surrounding terrain in short, controlled bursts. But her firepower disappears into the night.

“Fuck,” Joan yells into the sound and light. Another ear-splitting crack shatters the air around them. Even louder than the first. Her head pounds. Nausea. She feels something warm near her ear. Everywhere, a blast of sound and light.

Staggering like a drunk from the pain of the sound, Joan spots Leone gathering up as many of the maps as she can and jamming them into her backpack and waistband.

“Let’s not wait around to see who’s coming to dinner,” Leone yells, making for the boulders they hid behind earlier.

Joan grips the PG-29 in her hand. A Skyline is ripping open. Right in front of them. If she doesn’t find it and hit it, they are dead. She positions the warhead at the head of the RPG, then squats down on the ground and shoves the PG-29 down the shaft and secures it. Her brain is a bowling alley. She smells her own blood. There isn’t much time. She hoists the RPG up and squares the shoulder brace. She grips the trigger. She looks through the night sight scope. Blue and green crosshairs illuminate her vision. She aims at the sky in the direction of the light and sound, but it is like aiming at a fucking aurora. She closes her eyes. Concentrate.

Find it. Find the sound.

The blue light at her head flutters alive. A faint hum—a single low note—weaves through her skull.

She turns to face the sky and opens her eyes to adjust the trajectory on the scope, allowing it to help focus her energy. Then she closes her eyes again and hums a long steady note until it matches the tone in her skull, she keeps humming it until she feels part of the matter of things. Finally she drops the weapon gracefully to the ground. The weapon and scope merely help her to focus.

Her shoulders shoot back, as if from recoil, but she holds her ground. When the force that shoots out of her whole body hits the empty night air, an invisible Skyline produces a dazzling, fire-white line from earth to heaven, a jagged tear in the moment of things accompanied by a dizzying explosion. The air around them, as far as they can imagine, detonates with sound.

Bull’s-eye.

Joan eyes the black bruise of night. Long wretched fingers of white and blue tracers stream out from the blast line in all directions. An opera of chaos lights up the night. Joan can smell the fierce burning—the shorting-out of currents. She is momentarily deaf.

“Fuck you,” she screams at the sky and its drama. One less entrance and exit, shitheads.

As the light and sound show begin to wane, Joan breathes heavy. She looks around at the munitions site. The dead men, the artillery and RPGs, the pack of corpse girls buried in the dirt. And Leone.

Leone steps close to Joan and reaches up to wipe the blood from Joan’s ear, then sucks her own fingers. “Well, you taste alive,” she says, barely audible.

Joan smiles. Smoke dissipates. Light or sound no longer surrounds them. Finally she hears only Leone breathing. They need to get back to the caves.